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Saturday, January 5, 2013

Citizen Corporation vs. Birth Control

It was
perhaps inevitable that following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which solidified the claims of
corporations to “enjoy” rights that liberal democracy has been trying to bestow
upon people, that some such person-like entity would claim that his (or her?)
right to practice religion is violated by government’s efforts to make sure all
people are treated equally and fairly.Indeed this has happened, as Ian Millhiser reports
on ThinkProgress¸and a US Court of
Appeals has lent credence to her (or his?) case.The effort to help insure that people are
treated fairly in question is the provision in the Affordable Care Act (the
ACA, which I’ll pass on referring to by its pejorative name even though I think
it’s bad legislation) that employers of more than 50 people must provide health
insurance to all their full-time employees, and that said insurance needs to
meet a number of various criteria so that people need not worry excessively
about their inability to pay for basic healthcare, and among these criteria is
a mandate that certain forms of birth control that are commonly administered as
health care service be included.

There
are many good, sane reasons why this provision makes sense:birth control is commonly utilized by a vast
majority of Americans, particularly women who, because of biology, bear the
consequences of not using it; the cost of birth control is much higher for
women than for men and women are generally more reliable users of it when it is
available; alternatives to providing birth control outside of the medical
system are there, but tend to be less reliable and more dangerous;easy access to birth control is the simplest
and most cost-effective way to minimize unwanted pregnancies and abortions;
birth control for women is inextricably linked to many facets of health care in
addition to preventing pregnancy.There
are more, I’m sure, but these alone constitute some very compelling reasons why
the people, acting through the state, are justified in making sure that access to birth control, for those who
choose it or need it, is available to as many people as possible – especially
women.

But as
we all know, the Catholic Church right away got his (or her?) panties in a wad
because she (or he?) thought that his (or her?) right to object to other people
using birth control by refusing to associate herself (or himself?) with it by
not allowing any expenditure for it in the paper trail that follows from his
(or her?) engagement in whatever business practice they are in was being
violated.I apologize for the
excessively confusing language here, but the plain fact is that this objection
is, by any objective standard, pretty obtuse.They are not being asked to go out and buy birth control pills for
anyone; they are only being asked to provide a comprehensive health-care plan
for people they employ, and, like it or not, many forms of birth control are
almost universally considered part of human health care. I also apologize for the excessive use of
parentheses to allow for ambiguity with gender-specific pronouns – I know this
is a common problem for our antiquated language, but seriously, help me out
here: if corporations are people, what gender do we use to refer to them?Do we just follow our antiquated custom and
generally assume they are male unless a vote is taken in which a majority of
shareholders declare that she is, in fact, a female corporation?But I’m getting ahead of myself.I’m sufficiently open-minded enough to accept
gender ambiguity anyway.

The
case that came before the Seventh Court of Appeals didn’t involve the Catholic
Church, however.It involved a public
construction company that is mostly (88%) owned by a married couple, Cyril and
Jane Korte, K & L Contractors.I
don’t know if the contracting they do mostly involves building churches and
orphanages and soup kitchens and the like, but they do claim that they operate
their business in accordance with their religious beliefs.That’s fine – more power to them, in
fact.And if, as employers, they had a
policy of forcing their employees to use birth control out of a religious
belief that all mothers should not have jobs so they can devote all their time
to motherhood, I’m sure that many other powerful religious institutions and
individuals, including, I’m guessing, the Korte’s, would rightly cry foul.But of course that’s not what’s going on here
(although it’s close.) The Korte’s – or,
specifically, the “person” of K & L Contractors – is claiming that his (or,
again, her?) right of religious freedom is being violated because she (he) is
being forced to subsidize the behavior of another person, behavior that he
(she) finds religiously objectionable. Since religious freedom is a pretty basic and
important thing, let’s be clear about this claim: they (the Korte’s; we could
address our friendly gender-neutral but religious freedom-craving “individual”
here, K & L, but for now, let’s keep it simple and say “they,”) are not
being forced to take birth control themselves, nor are they compelling anyone
else to take birth control.That would
be a pretty obvious violation not only of religious freedom but basic civil
liberties and common decency.Their
objection is that by providing health insurance that offers coverage for people
to get birth control in a health care setting they are somehow linked to this
evil practice – by the aforementioned paper trail, to be exact.In colloquial terms, they are being compelled
to “pay for” a third party to violate their (the Korte’s, not the third
party’s) religious beliefs.That
compulsion, they argue – successfully in this case – is a violation that
outweighs the interest of the people to provide comprehensive health care to
employees of any company employing at least fifty.What I’m not clear on from my research is
that if an employee on her own – sans coverage – goes out and buys birth
control with the money she earned working for K & L if that would
constitute a similar religious violation over which the company may terminate
the employee for forcing the company to be associated with that oh so messy
business of real life.Seriously, should
employers really be expected to just give
their employees wages without any method to insure that the employee won’t use
it to some evil end?What would the
world come to?

But
yes, unfortunately the Seventh Court sided with the Korte’s, and for now,
they’re exempt.It is an instance in
which our courts are using some extremely twisted logic to undermine the
efforts of democracy and common decency.The twisted logic, in this case, is twofold: 1) that there is a “person”
who’s religious practice is being infringed upon, and 2) that the payment of money
to support someone else making decisions constitutes a violation of religious
freedom.This second point is one I’m
very glad to know about, for it means that I can simply begin deducting from my
federal income tax the appropriate percentage of funds used by the government
to build and deploy intercontinental nuclear warheads, maintain illegal
military bases in other countries, invade and destroy less developed countries,
murder foreign enemies by unmanned drones, etc.These are all violations of my religious principles, and boy am I
relieved to know that I no longer have to support these atrocities through my
tax dollars.Wow – having a religious
conscience winds up saving me a lot of money!Same is true for the State of Washington’s use of the death penalty – I
can’t wait to go to the store and pay only that portion of the sales tax that
is not used for anything I find religiously objectionable and see the look on
the clerk’s face.What a great country
we live in!Oh, wait, I won’t get away
with that.Why not?Because the idea that “my” money should not
be used to fund anything I find objectionable is a pipe dream.It’s never been the law of the land, and
should never be.The only time I hear of
it being taken seriously, in addition to the above scenario, is for the
government funding of abortions.It
seems as though the only religious principles that are strong enough to extend
into paper trails are those “religious” principles that, curiously, only apply
to women having autonomy over their bodies.Religious principles such as “thou shalt not kill” are apparently so far
down on the list that we need not worry about our implication in them,
especially when the victims of such violations are mostly poor, brown-skinned
people in faraway lands or neighborhoods.

Boy, do
I hate it when people use terms like “religious freedom” to mean “political
bigotry.”

The
other twisted logic, that entities like K & L Contracting are people, is,
of course, poppycock.They aren’t.Our Constitution, which has been dragged
through the mud by the more powerful trying to control the power of the people
in court cases ranging from the 1886 Santa
Clara County case to 2010’s Citizens
United, will be amended soon to stipulate that the rights enumerated in the
constitution apply only to real, living persons.If the state decides it is convenient from a
legal perspective to treat corporations – private or public, for-profit or not
– as if they are persons for administrative purposes, there is probably little
objection to that.But that does not
imply that because they are treated like persons administratively that they are
in any way entitled to the human
rights enumerated in our Constitution.To do so is a savage affront to the integrity that our founders put into
the Bill of Rights, and indeed all people who gave their lives to the
broadening of liberal democracy and a government of, for, and by the people.It is also, as when two people’s rights come into conflict, an attack on
the security of these rights of the less powerful by the more powerful.Our government and our constitution exist
primarily to protect the relatively less powerful, and we are sorely in need of
a reminder of this principle – one of the few over which I’ll give my life if
necessary.

What
does that mean for K & L Contractors?I can only speculate as to why Cyril and Jane Korte decided to
incorporate their “family run” business into a corporation, but I suspect it had
something to do with accounting practices, taxes, liability, and
profitability.They probably reap many
benefits by being a corporation rather than individual proprietors, and judging
from the fact that they apparently have more than fifty nearly full-time
employees, I suppose they have.Fine –
more power to them (notice a little tongue-in-cheek here, I hope?)If they were individual proprietors, then
they’d probably still claim rights violations according to twisted logic number
two, but they would be thrown in jail if they attempted to withhold money from
their taxes if they, following my suggestion above, decided that religious
infringements in which the victims are ten-year-old girls attending family
weddings in Afghanistan, for example, were as important as those which
victimize poor, innocent spermatozoa.But they – or, more accurately, he/she/it/whatever K & L Contracting
is – is not an individual person who craves the liberty enshrined in our
Constitution.It employs over fifty
people, and law in our liberal democracy stipulates that the community is
better off, and the vulnerable better protected, when health insurance coverage
includes those items most needed by the majority of our citizens.The corporation, of course, could be much larger
than fifty employees – fifty is a more or less arbitrary number in the new law,
a necessary line in the sand to determine at what point an employer has enough
influence to actually effect the well-being of the community they serve that it
be compelled to do so in a consistent way; consistent with other corporations,
and with the law of the land.

I’ve
heard some people say in response to this scenario that the employees – if
their employer doesn’t comply with the contraception provision – can simply
find other jobs.I find these comments to
be the most ignorant of all, and are likely made by those who, by some
combination of good fortune and hard work, have never been in a position of
needing a job when jobs for which they are qualified are scarce.We live in a world in which most people feel
lucky to have a job, and luckier still if the job they get is one that pays
well enough for them to make a decent living, is located reasonably close to
home and family, doesn’t involve anything that is a threat to their physical or
bodily health, is not terribly degrading or dehumanizing, includes benefits so
that they need not worry excessively about tragedy striking, is one they are
well-suited for and can do well, and one that will lead to more diverse job
opportunities in the future.Sadly, I
know all too many people who have to make compromises in one area or more, and
those making these comments want to add to that list that the job needs to come
from an employer that doesn’t have any religious objection to the provision of
basic benefits.All to spare the
employer the very minor discomfort of knowing that the security they are
offering their employees in exchange for their work is not necessarily one in
which they’d choose for themselves.

Who was
it that said “Let them eat cake?”

If this
case is upheld as the law of the land, it will, tragically, be one more
instance of the wealthy and powerful hijacking the spirit of human rights to
maintain their dominance over the less fortunate.How very sad.How very important that we Move to Amend!